The QuickBooks team at Intuit hosted Get Connected Canada—a multi-city series of networking conferences for accounting and bookkeeping professionals—with support from our third-party developer community. The goal of the series is to provide a platform for attendees to learn, connect, and grow their businesses by learning about the latest innovations from QuickBooks and our third-party developers. This year, these included conference sponsors Artiffex, Dext, Plooto, SOS Inventory, Keeper, Knowify, Stamped, NiceJob, Synder, and more.
The Get Connected Canada 2023 events were well attended and took place in Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, and Toronto including in-depth breakout sessions, a number of networking opportunities, and two-time Olympic gold medalist and CPA Alex Bilodeau as keynote speaker. Today, I’m sharing some of the key takeaways.
Key Takeaways from Get Connected Canada 2023
At Get Connected 2023, accounting and bookkeeping professionals had the opportunity to build relationships, expand their networks, and gain valuable insights and knowledge from industry experts. I had the honor of delivering our product keynote where I discussed the latest QuickBooks innovations and how they can help accounting professionals improve their efficiency and provide better service to their clients. I discussed recent enhancements to QuickBooks, including improvements to bank feeds, data-in automation, and multi-currency APIs.
My goal for the sessions was to inspire accounting professionals to embrace innovation and technology, and to encourage them to collaborate with their peers to drive mutual benefit across the community. I wanted attendees to leave the sessions feeling empowered and excited about what technology and collaboration can bring to their businesses. I also emphasized the importance of continued feedback from the accounting community in shaping QuickBooks innovation. Along with other speakers and session leaders, I believe the in-person connections made during the events helped build relationships and foster collaboration within the accounting community. Networking opportunities allowed attendees to meet and connect with other professionals in their field, share ideas, and learn from each other’s experiences.
The panel discussions and keynotes also provided valuable insights into industry trends, best practices, and emerging technologies. These insights into the latest developments in the accounting industry provided attendees with new ideas to improve their business. And the receptions and parties facilitated better partnerships by offering a relaxed and informal setting for attendees to connect with each other, breaking down barriers, and encouraging attendees to share their experiences and ideas more freely.
Personal Takeaways from Get Connected Canada 2023
Attending events like Get Connected Canada provides accounting professionals with valuable opportunities while also providing Intuit team members with insights we might not receive anywhere else. As such, here are my personal takeaways from these must-attend events:
Live feedback
Receiving live feedback from hundreds of customers and partners telling us what we’re getting right—and what we’re not—is immensely valuable for surfacing gaps in our end-to-end delivery, and for stress testing our medium-term product roadmap and research agenda, all with a view to magnifying our impact for this awesome community.
Deeper connections
Connecting in person allows us to make deeper connections. It allows attendees to engage in meaningful conversations with each other and with the Intuit team. My own conversations included discussions about alternative business models for accounting firms, coaching for high performance, the new era of generative AI, the importance of community to our ProAdvisor community, and where QuickBooks is hitting the mark and where we have opportunity to add meaningful incremental value.
Powerful breakout sessions that empower the whole community
I was blown away by the expertise of our bookkeeping and accounting partners in breakout sessions. It’s tremendously gratifying to know that we contribute to powering this expertise and empowering entrepreneurs.
The breakout sessions also underscored how crucial accountants and developers are to each other’s success. Developers create apps that help accounting professionals streamline their workflows, automate tasks, and provide better service to their clients. In turn, accounting professionals provide valuable feedback to developers on how to improve their apps and make them more useful for the accounting community.
Apps can help accounting professionals grow their business by providing them with tools to increase efficiency, accuracy, and productivity. For example, apps can automate specific, high-volume tasks as Dext does for receipt management, Snyder does for e-commerce bookkeeping, and SOS Inventory does for managing inventory. This frees up time for accounting professionals to focus on higher-value tasks such as advising clients and driving efficiency and providing a better service to their clients with access to deeper, contextualized financial data and insights.
Overall, the collaboration between accountants and developers is essential to driving innovation and growth in the accounting industry.
“The Best Accounting Community on the Planet”
Cheryl Manmohan, Sr Community Leader, Community and Engagement at Intuit, and a valued member of the Get Connected team, had this to say after the series wrapped up in Toronto: “As with Vancouver, Calgary, and Montreal, we were thrilled to welcome so many newcomers to our QuickBooks community here in Toronto and to reconnect with friends we haven’t seen in a while. I have the deepest gratitude to everyone for investing your time with us, sharing your experience and knowledge, and being a source of inspiration to each other and to our teams at Intuit. We truly do have the best accounting community on the planet!”
I couldn’t agree more. Through events like Get Connected Canada, our team hopes to tighten the sense of community among ProAdvisors and, with the knowledge and feedback gained, foster innovation within QuickBooks and across the broader ecosystem.
Stay tuned for more information about Get Connected 2024. In the meantime, learn more about our upcoming event QuickBooks Connect 2023.
Andrew Smith, Director of Product for Canada at Intuit, is focused on helping entrepreneurs—and the experts who serve them—prosper. Having grown up in a family of entrepreneurs, Andrew has spent much of his career working to solve the problems of small business owners as a startup founder and product leader.
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